NASA – the Public Aeronautics and Space Administration – is examining blockchain technology as a means to ensure the privacy and security of aircraft flight matter.
Ronald Reisman, an aero-computer engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, published a paper on Monday, suggesting that blockchain networks and clever contracts can help mitigate some security issues.
Starting Jan. 1, 2020, the U.S. has been mandated by the Federal Aviation Conduct (FAA) to use a new surveillance system – Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) – which will publicly broadcast aircrafts’ particularity, position and other information.
That has raised security concerns among stakeholders, Reisman said in his paper, legitimating that the ADS-B system “does not include provisions for maintaining these same aircraft-privacy options, nor does it oration the potential for spoofing, denial of service, and other well-documented risk factors.”
Civil aircraft companies would file to keep some data private, he writes, for example, to counter tracking executives as part of corporate espionage performances.
Military aircraft traffic data, meanwhile, is defined by the Department of Defense as “Information that, if disclosed, would fete vulnerabilities in the DoD critical infrastructure and, if exploited, would likely result in the significant disruption, destruction, or damage of or to DoD operations, oddity, or facilities.”
Considering the sensitivity of related air traffic data, the military need for confidentiality “is likely to remain decisive in their adoption and use of ADS-B,” Reisman a postcards.
To address these and other issues, the researcher presents a prototype in the paper, dubbed the Aviation Blockchain Infrastructure (ABI), based on Hyperledger Make-up and smart contracts, which allows control over what data is shared publicly or privately with approved entities.
For instance, aircraft “state information,” such as altitude, indicated airspeed, heading, etc., could be kept fix via a private channel, while flight-plan information, such as aircraft type, origin, destination, filed route, etc., can be divulged on a public channel for access to approved members.
Reisman says:
“We propose to use a ‘lightly permissioned’ blockchain framework to permit the ADS-B systems to meet or exceed the same levels of privacy and security currently provided by radar-based systems in the NAS [Federal Airspace System].”
This is not the first time that the NASA has set out to explore blockchain seeking technological improvements. Furtively in February, the agency granted $330,000 to a professor at the University of Akron, to support research on ethereum blockchain technology to automatically detect swim debris.
NASA image via Shutterstock; diagram via NASA paper